


Clockwise

by TheHSPlayer



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Horror, M/M, Mental Instability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23793895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHSPlayer/pseuds/TheHSPlayer
Summary: The last clock on Earth had stopped time ago. Funny. The mere concept became so abstract that sometimes it made sense, sometimes it didn't.
Relationships: Dib/Zim (Invader Zim)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	Clockwise

The last clock on Earth had stopped time ago. Funny. The mere concept became so abstract that sometimes it made sense, sometimes it didn't.

Outside was loud, and big. Zim had always thought of Earth as a big place, but now it was wider, taller than ever. Noisier, with all the animals claiming their right to exist, to express their presence, and make sure no voices would interrupt their endless song. It made Zim have chills. Humans had never terrified him more than animals did.

Earth was infinite. He had tried running from it, but he only ended up at the same place. Too afraid to explore beyond, knowing there was not a single presence that could tie him up to the ground anymore and he would drift away in the expanse of the big nothingness.

Except.

Scrapping buses, stores and old laboratories was a routine, as well as an annoyance. Nothing new, other than moss, oxide and bird nests where corpses were. A fair response of nature after centuries of human torture.

As he dragged his feet through the streets back to the base, his spooch weighted with anticipation. Good and bad, higher and lower polarity, he depended on gravity to keep his feet down, but it never stopped his mind from racing through the sky like a kite, swaying and pulling the old string of his sanity. A thin, putrid string that was moments from disintegrating as the foundations of humanity.

_Crruussshhhh..._

A new building going down in the city, and Zim mourned Babel’s spawn, and assured he had heard that. Its existence was appreciated. 

If you heard a tree fall in the forest, rather than making or not making noise, was it deserving of a soul that left the earthly plane after its death? Zim, as the sole owner, decided for the yes.

It was all his. All the souls, all the noises and the scraps, and the putrid of the galaxy. All full of dead stars, like clocks that stopped functioning one by one, until the only ticking in existence was symbolic. It was the gurgling belly of the supermassive black hole that was in the very center and was patiently sitting on its side of the table, consuming dish by dish until it would be the time for Earth, a mere decaying grape in a sea of regurgitated shit.

Entering the frame of the base was like a dimension of its own.

Computer had long ago stopped talking, instead focusing all efforts into creating and playing god in some corner of the world. After several malfunctions and glitches unable to salvage, it started believing that human souls began to haunt the place, therefore he analyzed the proper way to get rid of the unwanted presences, creating such an intricate extension of the base, like a cybernetic version of the Winchester mansion. It hungrily devoured cities and forests, grasping the valuable energy of the sun and wind to power up the desperate arms creating and shaping endless corridors to nowhere. The height was magnificent, a true work of art depicting fear and anxiety.

Walking the way in was a maze that Zim knew by spooch now, wondering if Computer had arrived already at the next continent on his endless search to contain all the seven billion souls successfully. When the walls would stop the wind from blowing enough to power him up. Would it be before, or after exhausting all resources? Was there anything underground as well that would lead to the core of the planet?

GIR sat on his couch, in the room of couches. He was watching a turned off TV, with his turned off eyes. Zim left an old box of pizza with a round piece of wood he had found in the street. Somehow the robot was dead, but the “pizzas” always ended up consumed, and after two years trying to find the consumer, he just assumed that his robot servant had grown tired of talking to him, and decided to activate whenever he wasn’t around.

The walk got to a point in which Zim had to use his PAK legs to sort out some tiny windows inside of ballrooms inside of bathrooms inside of more windows, but he wasn’t sure if he was going up or down. The temperature dropped either way, the twists he did in the air were disorienting, but he finally arrived at destination, having missed at least a quarter of the stuff he had scrapped.

Good thing he had learned to grab more just in case.

Heel, point, heel, point. His steps had echo in the expanse of dark, cut by color lights that were not really illuminating anything. For some humans the darkness meant close spaces, while for Zim, it meant the universe packed in the underground lab.

Sometimes he wished Computer came back to him, so Zim could tell him there were no such things as an army of ghosts. If there were, he wouldn’t feel as alone as he was.

“Tough outside?” he heard from the back of his head, where he adjusted his bifocals to notice Dib sitting in the back, slouched above some blueprints with a pair of goggles that gave him night vision. None of them wanted to turn on the lights, so Zim just observed a thin, tall figure barely lit by a blue PAK.

“What is tough about a bunch of animals roaming free, Dib-stink?” Zim retorted, exhausted.

“Outside this room, I mean”

Zim just offered him a shrug, and then an apple that Dib chewed distractedly, since neither of them needed to eat, but feeding was a capricious action they allowed themselves from time to time.

“You still wouldn’t last a day there” 

“So you keep saying”

“So I keep knowing”

“If you just let me try…”

Dib turned to him, the chain around his foot jingling noisily all over the lab, and Zim sternly looked to a side, refusing to acknowledge such restraint.

“You will leave”

“You will trace me”

“I won’t trace you fast enough. You will leave, and will get lost, and your PAK will run out of batteries. I won’t even see you die!”

Dib mimicked Zim’s lip movements while the alien kept his rant, throwing his arms in the air as he paced around. And it was good that he did. Dib never intended to move from that place, but provoking him and getting such strong reaction was good enough for him to know his space-boy had still his bite.

“I can’t let you leave”

“Come here”

“Kisses won’t fix this, Dib”

“Kisses will definitely fix this” the human smiled.

It was a toothy smile, both rows, from cheek to cheek, and Zim approached him, ignoring the cold he felt against his skin, to just leave a single peck that gave him back enough energy to roam the house for 100 more years. He then sat in the chair in front of the man, looking at his blueprints.

“Still having troubles figuring out the core functioning? I could tell you how to…”

“No, I want to figure it out myself” Dib assured “You brought me the scraps I asked you?”

“Mh-hm”

“Cool. So I see the core of the voot cruiser functions with an aliation that doesn’t exist on Earth but still I can make an identical material fusing these three components. That could give me enough playdough to try and shape a new core.”

“Please, do so before the next century”

“Ha-ha. funny”

Some hours passed. Zim felt his spooch’s beating to a regular pace as he was exposed more and more to Dib’s smile. The lights of his own blue PAK gave him a bit of an eerie aura, but his voice imbued all the atmosphere in a casual, even joyful experience.

“Zim?”

“Mm?”

“Can you get me another apple? I’m starving”

_Crruussshhhh..._

He stood up, and gave two steps back. The apple in the table remained intact, now like a sore thumb above a dusty table with a torn blueprint and 13 more rotten apples.

In front of Dib’s skeleton, with his toothy, cheek-to-cheek smile. Like he had been for the last 600 years. His blue PAK the only thing alive, still attached to the spine and keeping the whole structure together.

“Of course, Dib-thing” he answered, walking outside, to face once again the maze of windows inside of ballrooms inside of bathrooms inside of other windows.

His PAK leg knocked the pizza box on the way out, and when Zim looked back, he realized once again, GIR had eaten his pizza when he was not there. Silly old robot.

The last clock on Earth had stopped time ago. Now the only one left rested in the back of an alien who went counter-clockwise.


End file.
